How to handle negative reviews

“I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better.”                                                                                                        – Elon Musk.

With the world moving towards digitalization, customers give their valuable feedback to the products and services offered by businesses. Feedback is the accurate measure which tells you/ your brand on what to improve. Feedback is often received from customers in the form of reviews, articles, blogs and of course comments on social media platforms that you/your brand engages on. Feedback is always considered as an invaluable measure because it helps you/your brand think from the customer’s perspective. And what better than customers themselves conveying both the good and bad aspects of the products or services offered.

The most important form of feedback is an online customer review. Customer reviews sway genuine business results and the choices potential customers make to belittle or not disparage certain outfits. Much the same as their impact in reality, reviews not just give individuals a superior thought of the adequacy and nature of a particular product or service– they strengthen superior-than-normal customer experience, something all customers look for. 88 percent have been influenced by an online customer service review when deciding what to buy. That’s why business must be accepting and engaging towards every customer review – good or bad, always. Responding to positive customer reviews isn’t actually worrisome but negative reviews are difficult to deal with considering that it is always hard to take harsh criticism.

Every business wants to see only positive reviews and comments about their product or services. The truth is that we don’t live in a perfect world, and you will get negative customer feedback, however hard you try to please your customer, there’s no way around it. But there are many ways you can tackle them and turn them into positive engagement. So, let us look at some ways to handle negative reviews :

Respond Pensively and Swiftly:

Customers often write negative reviews when they are angry about your product or service but this should not happen from your end. Your response should be prompt but in a swift manner. Very few people are skilled at presenting their criticism and so don’t take negative reviews as a personal attack and so avoid self-defense. It’s obvious to react to negative feedback but try to distance yourself from emotions and closed-mindedness. Document the incident properly and try to figure out how to handle it with positivity.

Take the issue offline:

Never make your customers reach out for you after they have posted a negative review.    Try to take the issue offline by asking for their email id or a personal contact number. Apologize for the displeasure with your product or service. The best part of taking the issue offline is you can properly listen to the query and resolve it. This technique can clearly tell what imperfections to improve and come back strong. Once you have resolved the query, you can take that extra step to offer him/her compensation or future discounts. Remember, avoid doing it publicly as it can cast a bad impression on your other existing or potential customers.

Request the reviews to be removed:

Most customer review sites won’t permit you to expel surveys. On account of one that is disparaging or denouncing, demand that the site bring it down. Commonly, you should guarantee your professional reference before making the solicitation. After the query is solved you can ask the customer to delete the review so that it doesn’t account to any further loss of customers. 

Monitor your presence over the internet:

In order to handle negative reviews, you first need to know what customers are saying and where are they saying it. The tools like Mention and Google Alert are commonly used to monitor when and where people talk about your brand. You can leverage your social media handles to interact with customers and even ask them questions on how happy they are using your product or service. This technique empowers customers to share fun stories in the form of reviews while boosting the social media engagement of your brand.

It might happen that after all the above mentioned steps, negative reviews still might stay on your website and so you need an online reputation management system in place. You must have understood by now that negative reviews hamper your online reputation in the longer run and so it’s necessary to eliminate them. With outsourcing becoming the new normal, companies nowadays are consulting reputation management agencies to handle negative reviews anywhere on the internet. Online reputation Manage is one such agency with the best industrial expertise for relevant review generation. It has the best online reputation management tools to monitor you or your brand’s reputation sensibly in the online community i.e. blogs, articles, online forums, search engines and of course, social media.